


Into the Woods

by stover



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Central Park, Fighting Monsters, Gen, Mothman, Near Death Experiences, park ranger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 13:37:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10219496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stover/pseuds/stover
Summary: A brief, near-death experience informally introduces Lance to a man raising a child in the forest of New York City’s Central Park.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Original prompt:** _Klance prompt: I'm a park ranger and you're an escaped criminal that's been living in the park. I'm gonna have to call the polic- wait you have a kid? You've been raising a kid in the wild all alone???"_
> 
> Obviously, I do not know how to write anything romantic. :V

He’s walking in the woods.

There’s no one around, and his phone is dead.

From the corner of his eye, he sees—!

…Well, nothing, really. It’s the middle of the night, in Central Park. There’s really nothing out here.

He’s worked here long enough to know that nobody bothers to wander off to his grounds in the middle of the night. It’s a boring stretch of land that circles a giant lake; nobody cares for it when the sun’s gone and the moon is high. Some folks might, but not enough to risk getting lost in the park at night for cheap thrills. They’d be too close to the woods.

Even if there’s no one else around but him, he can’t shake off the feeling that there’s something actually there, lurking in the shadows, waiting for him to get close enough to—!

…To what, exactly? Get robbed? Stabbed? …Cannibalized?

He scoffs. _Don’t be ridiculous,_ he scolds himself, _How old are you, now? Twenty-seven? And you really think for a second that there are cannibals in New York City? Oh, please—_

**_SCRITCH SCRITCH_ **

He throws the light of his torch to the left. His heart pounds madly as he stares at a path of light illuminating a row of bushes. A rat tugs a pizza crust through the dirt. It scampers away as soon as it's spotted, taking its dinner with it. With a shaky laugh, he heaves a shoulder-sagging sigh.

“Get it together, Lance,” he says, tugging the brim of his hat over his eyes for only a second. He flicks it back up and continues his round.

Tonight’s supposed to be an early night, but Area 51 needed a pair of eyes and an extra body to run through it before the gates closed for real. This chunk of the park was an attractive hotspot for weirdos who believed in the stories about it being haunted and camped out here on dares. How an allegedly haunted forest path got the name of a government-protected alien crash site is beyond his understanding, but what he does know is that tonight’s the third in a row that Shiro’s MIA this week, and Lance was the lucky dog that got to experience the park’s coveted graveyard shift.

Oh, boy!

He walks down the trail of the Ramble a lucky man, looking for any signs of the usual weirdos who try to stay overnight as is always with the case for this place. He’s seen a few of them before, and can say with certain confidence that they were idiots, every single one of them. Well, except for that one fourteen year old girl who was here to prove a point. She was pretty damn smart. **(1)**

**_SCRITCH SCRITCH SCRITCH_ **

He whirls around. He points his flashlight dead ahead and there, in the light, he finally sees— …Nothing.

He turns.

Still nothing.

There’s nothing at all behind him; nothing at all except for the dirt path, and the row of bushes, and the line of trees, and the large “KEEP OFF THE GRASS” sign nailed to a tree, and the tall figure behind it shielding his eyes—

Lance shrieks and drops his flashlight.

The figure runs.

It isn't until the figure has disappeared completely into the forest that Lance snaps back to attention. “Hey!” Lance runs forward, chasing after the shadowy figure. “You can’t be here! The park’s closed! Hey!”

In chasing the stranger, Lance goes deeper into the forest than he’s ever gone before. He passes by stumps and fallen logs and something that looks like a hole in what might’ve been the biggest tree in the park. There’s an archway of leafy branches he almost runs right into, and slides along the dirt in the last minute to pass underneath. A sparkling stream gurgles alongside him as he runs deeper into the forest, chasing after the wayward stranger.

He never knew the Ramble had a trail that went through a forest like this. He didn’t even know the park had a forest like this in the first place, and he’s been working here for years, wandering the Ramble on whatever breaks he has and finding new shortcuts through bike paths and walking through creeks. He’s pretty confident that he knows the Ramble like the back of his hand, so it’s starting to freak him out when he’s still running and there are trees, trees, and even more trees that all seem to grow taller and thinner with no end in sight.

 _This place,_ he’s thinking to himself, _can’t be the Ramble._

The chase finally ends when the wayward stranger trips over something in the ground, and that’s when things get really weird.

A beastly creature with glowing, red eyes and thick, matted fur flies out of the trees and heads right for him.

“KEEEEEE!” the beast screeches.

“HOLY SHIT!” Lance shouts.

“RAAAAAAAH” the stranger yells.

Lance’s vision is suddenly 100% greasy, tangled black hair and a grimy, calloused hand that shoves him away with absolutely no regard to how close he was to a tree with sharp branches sticking out of its trunk. It’s only by the grace of God that he’s able to avoid turning into a human shish kebab, sticking a landing instead that feels like his ass just got bitch-slapped with a ten-pound block of ice.

Boy, is he gonna feel that for a while. And boy, is he gonna kiss his park ranger’s badge goodbye after tonight because he is _not_ taking another shift like tonight ever again, no siree! Lance isn’t a quitter by any means; he’s not someone who runs at the first sight of trouble. He’s the type to stand his ground. But this? This?? This was ridiculous. And this wasn’t even the first on his never-ending list of _“Weird Things that Happen on the Job.”_ Oh, no — this was more like the seventeenth.

Quitting his day-turned-night job was always something on the back of his mind. It wasn’t like getting attacked in Central Park in the middle of the night suddenly made him see the light of his sad, twenty-seven year old life; not at all. He’s always thought of getting a better job — a _real_ job. Otherwise, he’ll never amount to anything other than making the front page of the New York Post under a headline like “PARK RANGER MAULED BY WINGED FURRY.”

Well, at least he was better than the creepy stranger he’d chased down. The guy was probably homeless.

And, apparently, very capable of taking care of things all by himself because the stranger was wrestling a beastly creature twice his size and build?? THAT? ISN’T? NORMAL???

“What the hell?!” Lance screams out loud.

His shout seems to have triggered something in the creature, because its gleaming eyes narrow to pinpricks and turn sharply on him. Giant, bat-like wings suddenly burst from the beast’s back, ripping a gale of wins that makes Lance feels like he’s been thrown right into the path of a tornado.

The beast screams, high-pitched, flapping its thick wings, and throws the homeless stranger aside to lunge right for him.

Lance screams, throwing himself to the side and crawling away as fast as he can. A powerful grip with sharp, clawed tips wraps around his ankle. And then, he gets yanked back.

“OH MY GOD!” Lance digs his fingers into the dirt to try and anchor himself. All that does is uproot a bunch of twigs and rocks and a fat worm that wriggles in the upturned soil he’s forced to drag under his hands as he screams his throat raw. He’s starting to lose feeling in his leg, and his ankle feels like it’s been snapped off already or maybe isn’t even there.. That thought alone swaddles him in a cocoon of fear that chokes all the breath out of his lungs.

_“HRRRRRAAAAH!”_

The scream carries a timber that he somehow knows well enough to recognize as belonging to the homeless man. His heart thrashes in his chest when he hears it, and a spike of adrenaline surges through his body at the same moment he finally feels the iron grip on his leg disappear. Lance scrambles away, half crawling and half dragging his body through the dirt. He can’t feel his leg, and oh god, oh man, is it even there?? He takes one wild look behind him.

It is.

A sob of relief tears from his mouth. He reaches out to touch his leg, and then his ankle. Oh, thank god— Thank god!

“You! Park guy!”

It’s the first time since he’s entered the forest that he’s heard anyone actually speak. It startles him and, for a terrifying moment, his body freezes. His eyes land hard on the face of his savior — the homeless man — who is truly a sight to behold.

The man, who reeks of the sewer’s sour, putrid stench, is of a delicate, lithe build, covered head to toe in dirt and leaves. Despite his small stature, there is fire in his eyes, burning with a ferocity that arrests his thoughts and steals the breath from his lungs. This man, who has saved him not once but twice now, holds the shrieking, winged beast at bay with only a chokehold.

“Get out of here!” the man shouts, the strain in his voice thick and worrisome. The beast’s claws are hooking into his arm. Blood dribbles to the forest floor. “Hurry!”

Lance doesn’t move immediately; his eyes are stuck on the stranger, whose wild eyes sear into his soul. _Who is this guy??_ he wonders, a question amongst a million others that are but a twisting whirlwind in his head.

The whirlwind becomes a hurricane when he sees the beast reach over his head and yank the man off. The man is hurled to the side, slamming into the dirt and lying completely still. Lance feels his whole body grow cold as he waits and waits and _waits_ for the man to get up. He doesn’t.

The beast roars and beats its wings against the branches surrounding them overhead. The sound of splintering woods echoes in the background as heavy thuds pound the forest floor all around him. Terrified, Lance throws himself to the side and keeps his eyes skyward as he alternates between curling into a ball and letting wild debris explode all around him and crawling on the forest floor to get away. He shoves his way through the thin gaps between the trees — _(he doesn’t get why it’s so hard to navigate through the forest; didn’t he get here by running nonstop?)_ — and tries to get deeper into the forest where the beast can’t get him. He’s retreated a good way into the forest when he realizes with a start that the homeless guy is still back there. That makes him freeze.

Lance looks over his shoulder. He sees the beast, black fur and blood-red eyes and giant winds, shrieking and fighting against the circle of trees that are somehow still closed around it despite it already bringing down so many trees with its wings. His eyes rove wildly around that enclosure, searching desperately for any sign of the homeless man. Lance finds him, somehow unscathed and covered only with thin leafy branches, lying just behind a thin row of trees he is most certain was not there before.

He spends half a second looking at the beast again; it doesn’t seem to be aware of the man who’d attacked it, trained instead on taking flight in a tight grove of trees that seemed to growing smaller. Lance takes one look at the guy who’d saved his life, a homeless man who, now that he’s had time to really look at the guy’s face, couldn’t be that much older than him, and makes up his mind.

Lance turns around and goes back for the stranger.

It’s hard to squeeze through the trees. The bark is rough and the scrapes he’s collecting litter all over his body. But as he ventures on, keeping his gaze flitting back and forth between the rampaging monster and the unconscious man, he starts to get used to weaving through the trees without scraping the skin off his arms and legs and face. It’s either that, or the forest is moving.

Lance finally gets to the man on the ground. There’s a strong, pungent odor coming from the stranger, but Lance grabs him nonetheless. He tries to hoist the man onto his back before the beast spots them. The man is heavy, heavier than Lance imagined a homeless man would be, and in his panic he can’t seem to hold the man up long enough to get him onto his back and get out of there. The man slips from his grasp more than once; at one point, Lance nearly drops him face-first into the ground.

An ear-shattering screech fills the air, and razor winds slash at his face. Lance shuts his eyes and stills, frozen in place for half a second. When he opens his eyes, he sees the red-eyed creature heading right for them.

His mind stutters, filling with a newfound panic that keeps him stupidly rooted to the ground. He watches the winged beast descend upon them. _It’s gonna get us,_ is the wild thought in Lance’s head; _We’re dead. We’re so, so dead._

Still in his arms, the man shifts ever so slightly. He hears a light groan and feels the man moving against his chest. It ignites some new feeling in him, the knowledge that this man is awake. Without a doubt in his mind, Lance knows what he has to do. He’ll shove him to the ground and cover him; this man he doesn’t know, who’s risked his life to save him, who actually has a fighting chance against this thing — this man must make it out alive. His acceptance of what to do next is firm in his heart. Lance squeezes his hands around the man’s shoulders, ready to throw the man to the ground, cover him with his own body, and brace for the worst.

Instead, the man fights against him. The man rips his hands off and shoves him down with a single hand pressed to his chest. Hitting the ground knocks the wind out of him, and for a brief, terrifying moment, all Lance could do was lie on his back.

The man’s hand is still on his chest. His other hand was holding something wrapped in dirtied cloth, with something glowing through the layers of fabric. Suddenly, a crackling, purple spark lights up the night. Lance sees the horrifying face of the creature coming for them, sees the strips of cloth unraveling and coming apart. The unmistakable gleam of a blade glints in the darkness and the man suddenly lunges forward without a sound and plunges the blade into the beast’s chest. The beast gives a nightmarish scream, its red eyes blown wide in fury and pain. Its wings spread back and freeze. A weak snarl comes out of the beast’s mouth before growing very, very still. Then, the beast drops heavily on top of the man, who makes an alarmed shout.

For a while, neither moves.

Lance doesn’t, either. He lies on the ground, half-propped on an arm, and stares in utter disbelief at the creature lying motionless on the forest grounds of a New York City park. _“What the fuck,”_ he whispers at last, _“what the fuuuuck?”_ He squeezes his eyes shut, dumping his face in his hands, and slowly takes in a deep breath. Then, he blows it all out as one long, shaky breath. He shakes his head. “I am _so_ quitting my job.”

Something rustles. Lance snaps his head back up. One of the beast’s arms is twitching. Lance’s heart almost stops. It sinks rapidly into the pit of his stomach when the other arm starts to move. Lance watches in horror as the beast begins to rise… only to roll over on its side and flop on its back, face frozen in a wide-eyed, pained snarl. Emerging from the ground, free at last, is the the homeless man, who coughs and wheezes as he tries to sit up.

Lance snaps to attention. “H-Hey, are you— Are you okay?” he asks, scrambling to his feet. He gets around the body of the monster, eyeing it warily for half a second before giving all of his attention on the groaning, wheezing man who just saved his life. “Dude?” He reaches out with a hand.

The man slaps his hand away. “M-Marcy—” he croaks, blinking blearily through what seemed to be unseeing eyes. The gives another wheezing cough, hacking all over the front of Lance’s shirt.

He’s confused, Lance tells himself, trying to help the man up. “I’m Lance.” He speaks with a clear, steady voice. “I don’t know who Marcy is. It’s just us here— _Hey!”_

The man shoves heavily against him, throw his hands off and grunting and straining against a blind enemy. “Marcy,” the man says again, voice hoarse and thick with emotion. “Marcy!”

“Whoa, dude!” Lance shouts in protest as he’s shoved to the ground. His right hand shoots backwards to break his fall. His fingers dig deep into cold, wet soil. “Who the hell’s Marcy?”

The man’s face is pulled into a grimace as he turns away. Lance watches the man climb over the body of the dead beast and rise to shaky feet. The man shouts again, his voice a despondent cry in the woods.

“Marcy!”

The man takes a stumbling step forward.

“Marcy!”

The man stumbles again. This time, he falls.

Immediately, Lance is at his side. _He’s fucked in the head,_ he tells himself as he runs through a million and a half things he’s read about head trauma and drug use and sleep deprivation and starvation and— “Dude, I’m not—Quit shoving me! I’m not gonna hurt you! I’m trying to help—”

A heart-wrenching cry, distinct and familiar, wails distantly in the forest. It drives a chill down Lance’s spine. It makes the man freeze. Together, they stare into the black woods, where there is nothing but trees and empty darkness. The wailing continues, echoing like a siren’s call. Lance knows that sound intimately; as the oldest of five, it’s a cry he’s grown up with. It’s the sound of a baby.

The man bolts into the forest. “Marcy!”

Lance’s mouth drops open. “Hey! Wait!” He, too, scrambles to his feet to bolt into the forest. He makes it three steps in before his jacket gets snagged by a branch. He breaks it off and tries to go for a sprint. His foot gets caught in a root curled too neatly and shaped too close to the toe of his sneaker. A wind whispers against his neck, sending a shiver of fear through his body. “I’m quitting this job,” he tells himself in a quaking voice, “I’m quitting his job and getting out of this goddamn forest, I swear to fucking god.”

A sudden wind rips through the trees, making him shriek. The forest showers him in a bed of dead leaves and dried twigs, leaving him curled on the ground on his elbows and knees, face to the ground and arms over his head. The wind hurls dirt over his leaf-covered head, seeding his hair with dust of the earth as if he were a newborn under baptismal water. Fear’s long, spindly fingers stroke his spine with its cold, trembling touch; he shakes madly, whipping his head side to side and tearing his hands madly through his hair to throw the leaves and dirt off. Through clenched teeth, Lance spits out in anger, “This whole fucking forest can just— _GET FUCKED!”_

His echoing shout cuts into the sounds of the forest. His chest heaves from deep, gulping breaths as he runs his hands over his arms to chase away the sudden chill the forest sets upon him. His chattering teeth, his heavy pants, and the sound of calloused palms roughing over his jacket are alone the only sounds in the forest. The wind has stopped. There is no rustling of leaves, no shaking of branches. The forest is silent.

The forest, he realizes with great unease, is silent. _What happened to the baby?_ The question thrashes in his head.

Worry seizes him by the neck, hoisting him up to his feet and pitching him into the forest. He runs freely through the trees, passing by a murky stream of sodden leaves. He runs beneath a high archway of branches, coiled and bare, that dumps him right onto a dirt path surrounded by tall trees with gnarled limbs. He runs until a wide expanse of black catches his eye from beyond the thick line of trees. He halts where he is, somewhere in the middle of a forest he no longer knows, and turns slowly to face what he now sees is a large, cavernous hole of a great tree in the middle of the forest. Deep, sepia-soaked grooves scar the bark of the tree, whose rough, patchy skin stretches cracked and broken around a massive trunk large enough for three grown adults to make as their home. _Here,_ he thinks, _is the baby._

 _Here, too,_ he also thinks, _is the man._

He moves forward, placing one foot in front of the other in a slow, deliberate gait. There is little keeping him back now, save for the icy fingers tracing patterns along his spine. The hairs on the back of his neck are matted to his skin with sweat; otherwise, he’s sure they’d be standing on edge just as he is, with each step he takes. The still air trembles, soft whispers flitting by his ears in fervor. He hears his mother’s gentle voice in those quiet murmurs, and finds himself drawn further and deeper to a place unknown.

When he arrives at last to the entrance of a rust-orange, scarred enclave, he sees in the shadows the hunched figure of a man, cradling a wriggling bundle in his arms.

“Shhh, it’s okay, Marcy. Everything’s okay. Shhh.”

A gurgling whimper comes from the bundle. An arm twists out from the layers of cloth. It whimpers again.

“Shhh, Marcy. Daddy’s here.”

Bewilderment strikes him hard; here he is, standing at the entrance of an empty hollow inside the largest tree of a forest now completely foreign to him. Five years he’s worked here, and never has he imagined a night to turn out like this — a shadowy figure hiding in the woods rescuing him from a winged creature of the night, now found with a child tiny enough to be a newborn infant—

Part of the cloth falls away, and Lance sees a pale, round face with dark, purple splotches, and a squinty pair of glowing, yellow eyes.

 _“Hoooooo_ ly fuck,” he gasps, taking a step backwards and slamming right into a tree he has no recollection of it ever having been there, “Holy fuck, _holy_ fucking _fuck_ — _HO_ LY! _FUCK!”_

The infant’s face twists with an ugly scowl. It wails in a voice so eerily human it shoots ice down his spine and shatters whatever fear he has with slabs of shock that pummel into his head like a stampeding herd of animals.

“Shut up,” hisses the man, expertly shifting his hold on the infant so that its crying face lay over his heart, arms curling protectively around it, one over its head and one supporting its underside. The man gently bounces the infant up and down while rocking side to side and whispering, “Shhhh, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

His mother would have killed him if she was here, because he’s out of control now, running his mouth off and shouting and cursing and generally Making Things Worse.

“Holy _shit,_ dude— You have a kid— A kid?! Here?! In the forest?! You were raising a fucking kid in the wild?! Is that even a kid? It looks like a— Like—”

“Like what?” The man shoots him a stony look. “Go on, finish what you were saying. Like what?”

Lance’s arms gesture wildly around him. “I don’t— I don’t know! Just— Not human?! You can’t possibly stand there and expect me to be okay with somebody living in the woods, number _one,_ while raising some kid in the wild, number _two,_ with the kid looking like some kind of—” He bites his tongue at the murderous glint flashing in the man’s eyes, which he was starting to see was not black or a dark brown, as he’d expect from an Asian man, but dark purple. This detail sits in his head, out of place, and wears down the effects of initial shock as his brain kicks into gear and wonders, _Is he wearing color contacts?_

The man’s brow furrows. “What? No.”

Aw, shit. He wasn’t supposed to say that out loud.

“…Okay?”

Lance slaps a hand over his face. “Fuck.” Then he says it again. “Fuck, dude. What the _fuck.”_

“Watch your language,” the man hisses, curling his arms tighter around the infant.

Lance feels his face balk in response. “She’s barely even one! Twenty bucks says she doesn’t even know what we’re saying.”

The baby starts to cry, her quiet, soft whimpers curling in his ears and turning into pitiful wails. Immediately, the man starts bouncing the child gently on his arm and rubbing the small infant’s back in slow, soothing circles. His gesture to calm the infant are a stark difference to the sharp look in his eyes, which pin a vicious look on Lance. “Stop. _Shouting.”_

“Okay, okay,” Lance hurriedly raises his hands. “Sorry, it’s just… Not everyday you see a guy out here and, you know. Raising a kid. Out here. In the wild. In the middle of nowhere.”

“This is New York City. Stop trying to make it sound like we’re in the mountains.”

Lance flicks a finger at the man. “Hey, there’s plenty of mountains upstate.”

“We’re not upstate, you idiot. We’re somewhere between 76th and 78th street.”

“Actually, it’s somewhere between _74th_ and 78th. The Ramble extends all the way from— Hey, where are you going?”

The man had left the cavern in the tree and walked right past Lance the minute he launched into a practiced speech describing his grounds. When Lance calls after him, the man stops and turns with an arched brow. “Home?”

For a long moment, Lance does nothing but stare at the man in complete silence. He watches the way the man returns it with suspicion in his eyes and a frown on his lips. Lance cannot understand how the stranger doesn’t realize why he’s having a hard time understanding this new piece of information. “So,” he starts slowly, “What you’re saying is… You don’t live here?”

A look of bewilderment crosses on the man’s face. “Uh, no?”

Lance eyes the man’s dirty, unkempt hair, takes note of the heavy, musty stench hanging in the air, and sees traces of the park’s dirt smeared on the man’s face and worn clothes. “Okay,” he says at last. “Sounds fake, but okay.”

The man’s eyes narrow at him. “…Excuse me?”

“Nothing.”

The man’s eyes are still narrowed. “Right.” He shifts the weight of the child in his arms. “Can you move? I need to get home.”

Lance stares at him again. Now, it’s his turn to say, “…Excuse me?”

The man nods in his direction, jutting his chin out in some vague direction where he stands. “You’re in my way.”

Lance opens his mouth to comment. Then shuts it. He opens it again, his brows creasing as he tries to make sense of what was just said. “I think you’re lost,” he finally supplies, pointing straight ahead. “The exit is that way. There’s only one path out of the… woods.” The last of his words die on his tongue as he stares dead ahead in the once-familiar, strange forest now turned even stranger.

There is no winding dirt path in the forest, nor any indication of him having come this way. Instead, there is only an endless grove of trees, their thick, scarred trunks huddled closely together. A slow-stretching smile creeps tightly across his face as he comes to the shaky realization that the only way out of the forest is gone. “Okay,” he says with dead cheer, “now there’s no way out of the woods.” Lance turns back to the man with a forced grin. “At least we have each other, right?”

The man scoffs. “What are you, ten?”

“On the inside? Probably younger.”

The man narrows his eyes and frowns, fixing a perplexed look his way. “I’m not leaving the woods,” he says, bringing the subject back around. The tone used suggests that the man is incredulous; there’s a lifting lilt in his words which makes Lance, in turn, question him. “You don’t leave these woods,” says the man, “You go into it.”

For a second, Lance thinks he’s heard wrong. “Excuse me?”

“Could you move to the side? You’re kind of in my way.”

Numb and mute, Lance follows the man’s directive and steps to the side. No sooner had he gone away from the entrance of the cavern, did a crackling purple light erupt from the stranger’s fingertips. He shrieks, stumbling and tripping over his own two feet as he scrambles quickly to the stranger’s side. He stands frozen and still, watching the crackling light dance across dead leaves on the floor and buzz and circle around the edges of the hollow in the tree. An occasional strand of light flashes across the diameter of the open space in the tree, and each time Lance sees a spark of something reflecting in that hollow, forever changing; a glimpse of some emerald forest, a sliver of a sparkling sea; a flash of a golden desert; a whisper of a windy mountaintop; a vision of fiery wastelands.

Then, the entrance flashes blindingly white, just once, before settling down to a soothing, ethereal and smoky silver light that pours out into the woodlands.

The man lowers his arm, flickers of purple light fizzling along his fingers as the energy died down. He turns then, facing Lance. “Are you coming?”

Lance stares at the stranger, who’s giving him an expectant look. His mouth opens, jaw unhinging slightly as his tongue tries to form a response. Nothing comes out but silence.

“You’re gonna be late,” the man says, shifting the weight of the child in his arms. “They’re already waiting for you.” With just that, the man turns back around and runs into the light.

For a while, Lance does nothing but stand where he is, staring blankly at the soft, ethereal glow of light misting from the hollow entrance of the great tree. A gentle wind rustles through the trees to shake leaves into his hair and press a careful hand on his back. He hears the forest whisper in quiet, tittering voices; dead leaves chatter and swirl at his feet. The forest sends stray leaves and voices into the cavernous opening of the great tree. _Go inside,_ says the dead leaves as their dried-up bodies tumble into the empty hollow. _Come this way,_ says the wind as it whistles past his ears.

Lance clenches his jaw and swallows hard.

He takes a deep breath.

And he runs, into the woods.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

**ENDNOTES**

**(1)** [The Ramble](http://www.centralparknyc.org/things-to-see-and-do/attractions/ramble.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/) is a small part of Central Park recently re-opened to the public. You **will** get lost at the Ramble.

**Author's Note:**

> "s-tover" on Tumblr.


End file.
